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Jules Dassin Paralysis of the creative impulse MCCARTHYISM

The second cite gives background to the work of Dassin and to his role as director /actor in Rififi and the mention of other filmmakers stymied by thje paralysis of the McCarthy years.

His next project turned out to be Rififi, a crime thriller filmed in Paris.Dassin adapted it from a book that he hadn’t much liked. He wrote a screenplaywith a collaborator in seven days. One of its most famous sequences is a33-minute scene without music or dialogue, the scene of the crime itself. Thescene is much praised for its unremitting tension, but Dassin points out thatone of the chief reasons for the lack of dialogue was his unfamiliarity with theFrench language and his desire to produce as short a script aspossible.“Critics are divided over the work. François Truffaut apparentlyconsidered it one of the greatest crime dramas ever made, at least at the time.Sarris regarded it as overrated, and Jean-Luc Godard, then a critic, commentedsuperciliously in 1959: “Jules Dassin wasn’t at all bad when he was shootingsemi-documentary style among Italian fruit-workers of San Francisco, in the oldwooden subway of New York, on the dreamy docks of that charming city which, asSacha Guitry said, the English insist on calling London. But one day, alas, ourJules began to take himself seriously and came to France with a martyr’spassport. At the time, Rififi fooled some people. Today, it can’t hold a candleto [Jacques Becker’s 1954] Touchez pas au Grisbi, which paved the way for it,let alone [Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956] Bob le Flambeur, which it paved the wayfor.”> Be that as it may, Rififi is a competently and intelligently made andacted film, with Dassin playing one of the criminals. Berg notes, “While writingthe screenplay, his [Dassin’s] experiences of the hard times he and many of hiscolleagues were living through had a profound influence on the script. ‘I wasthinking when I was writing about my character’s death,’ he says. ‘There’s aclose shot of me saying, “You’ve got to shoot me,” and I was thinking so much ofthe guys who were blacklisted. [In the scene] they want [Dassin’s character] togive names to the gangster that’s going to kill me and I was thinking, No, youdon’t give names. I was thinking of all my friends who during the McCarthy erabetrayed other friends.“Dassin became romantically and artistically involvedwith Greek actor Melina Mercouri in the mid-1950s. Some of their films togetherare forgettable, or worse (He Who Must Die [based on a Nikos Kazantzakis novel],The Law, Phaedra). Never on Sunday (1960), with Mercouri as a lightheartedprostitute, is something of a fantasy and a trifle, but it helped open theAmerican cinema up to a more realistic, or at least less prudish, attitudetoward sexual matters. It’s not coincidental that the cheerful work came out atthe same time as the end of the blacklist. Topkapi (1964), another heist film(with Mercouri and Peter Ustinov), but this time in a comic vein, is also aslight work, but it too helped loosen up American audiences and introduced themto a more knowing, cynical European attitude toward cops and robbers.“Dassin’slife was bound up with critical events in the 20th century. He became a victim,along with many other talented figures, of the anti-communist frenzy of the1950s, a frenzy that crippled artistic and intellectual life in the US fordecades. The film industry still suffers from the purge of left-wing andcritical spirits.What kind of work he and others of his generation mighthave produced under more favorable circumstances is obviously an unanswerablequestion. No one seems to have doubted his sincerity or honesty.BertrandTavernier, French filmmaker and film writer, observed: “McCarthyism, in reducingto silence a whole generation of young filmmakers (Dassin, Losey, Berry, Rossen,Polonsky, Enfield), important screenwriters (Trumbo, Wilson, Maltz, Buchman,Ring Lardner Jr., Hugo Butler), paralyzed an entire creativeimpulse.”Comment by Edward Yablonsky — November 26, 2009 @ 5:51pm